ABSTRACT
More than a decade ago, then mayor of Seattle, Greg Nickels, proclaimed during an interview with Grist magazine:
[W]e have become aware … as to the fact that global warming is happening. It was even on the front page of USA Today that the science really is not in dispute. And we are going to have to take action in our individual lives to change that.
(Little 2005) This was part of a series of public statements made by Nickels in support of his newly created US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which helped propel cities to the forefront of the climate change policy debate (Rice 2010). It is important to remember that Nickels’ statement was two years before the Fourth Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007), and it was also several years into the administration of President George W. Bush, who systematically denied that there was any agreement among scientists as to whether climate change was even happening. So, what benefit, if any, would this stance in the climate science wars provide for Seattle’s urban governance? What effect, if any, did this have on the practice of climate science? The analysis provided here attempts to begin to unravel the relationship between science and urban governance, using a case study of Seattle’s climate planning from the late 1990s until 2013, a period of aggressive climate action by a series of three mayors (Paul Schell, Greg Nickels, Mike McGinn).